i cannot comprehend how this thing went from an embarrassing mess to a genuinely really cool device, nor my role in doing so
aahahahahahahhaha OKAY SO,
I've just been informed by a commenter on this video that, although I would never have tried this anyway, if I had decided to attempt to upgrade the Edge from 2007 firmware all the way to present in order to download games from Live, it would have bricked the machine.
With firmware that old, one of the stages in the upgrade process would have been to apply a patch to the DVD drive to allow it to read a new disc format MS introduced late in the machine's life, and when it hit that point it would have hung forever and never worked again.
Beautiful
i love seeing people discover in real time how horrible and pointlessly hostile microsoft's console hardware is.
The 360 is the console that, in 2005 and on a 3 core system, ran everything in a hypervisor to (try to) prevent software exploits.
The console that, as mentioned in the video, paired optical drives to motherboards to (try to!) prevent people from loading non original disks, since the optical drive itself is most of the authentication process.
The console that, because of people flashing their DVD drive to load DVD-Rs, moved the DVD drive flash onto the same package as the controller to try and prevent flashing... and people found a way to drill into the package to short the write protect wire, so they could flash it anyway.
The console that, has fuses on the die level of the CPU to prevent firmware rollbacks in case an important security bug gets fixed.
The console whose primary method of exploit, almost 20 years after launch, is by slowing the CPU down as much as possible on boot and sending a tiny reset signal at the exact moment to make a logic check pass which should otherwise fail, to break the root of trust on every layer of firmware on top of that. No webkit exploits, no maintenance modes, just straight up CPU hardware exploits.
And because of all of this, it IMO has generated more revenue for piracy companies than any other console of it's era. "JTAG" exploits were using the System Management Controller (SMC) to load the King Kong shader code exploit at boot. People were happy to sell you a FPGA or CPLD board and some software to help you flash the SMC with the requisite software to do that. The people developing these mods probably knew that the SMC could have been used to do the reset glitch too, if not at first then surely after some of the optimizations, but selling dirt cheap CPLDs on a simple PCB for a big markup is good money. "RGH3" is in fact, using the 360's built in microcontrollers to slow the CPU down and do the glitch, rather than an external board. This didn't exist until only a couple of years ago. It's pure speculation, but I honestly believe that this was a known exploit, at least in theory, for years. It was simply never made public because it would have made glitch boards a lot less valuable.
And this is completely ignoring stealth servers and services, which I've never messed with but I believe were paid services at some point, if not still at present, all in the name of being able to play online on a hacked system. And I'm also willing to speculate, citation needed, that one could have paid for unbanned keyvaults to get back online after being banned back in the day too.
The 360 modding scene to me still has that kind of, sleaze, that I don't get when I'm trying to find info for hacks on any other console. It feels not very far away from people whose goal is more to make money off of angry gamer nerds desperate to cheat online in CoD instead of, people wanting to run homebrew or at least are interested in the inner workings of a console's security system. I put the blame of this on Microsoft, of course.
And this sucks, because the technical details of all of this are really cool! It's super fun! It's hard to find info about a lot of it since it was in people's financial interest for the details not to be public!
Of course, Microsoft learned their lesson and made their next console virtually impossible to hack. Partially because, there's very little to gain in hacking it. What are you going to do, play Forza 5? lol
There's a wonderful video presented by one of the security design leads of the Xbox One about it's security systems that not only gives great technical insight, but you can also feel some of the contempt in his words for the kind of people that were breaking these systems open. And contempt for the kickback they got about trying to remove the optical drive, since it was the one part of the system they probably had the least control over securing.
Or, if you like learning about more flawed systems, the absolute classic Xbox (2001) security talk is a must watch. I link it every time this comes up because I really think everyone remotely interested in computer science should watch it.
